In 1987 thousands of hand-pasted posters appeared overnight across New York City. Their subversion of a Nazi image became a symbol for the self-empowerment of AIDS activists, and in Trump’s America its inluence still reverberates to this day. Will St Leger of ACT UP Dublin meets the poster’s co-creator, Avram Finklestein, to talk about the agitprop movement sparked by Silence=Death.

In early 1987, thousands of graphic posters shot up on the walls of New York city. The posters had a black background in which a pink triangle floated above blocky white type, shouting the slogan, ‘Silence=Death’. The appearance of these hand-pasted bills created intrigue, dialogue and questions about their subject matter. To the casual viewer their stylised design seemed to match a familiar vernacular of 1980s advertising, but for queers they contained a forboding statement and an esoteric clue – the pink triangle.

The pink triangle’s history began in 1930’s Germany, when the Third Reich used it as a badge of shame to mark homosexuals in Nazi death camps. Although rooted in death and oppression, it was reclaimed by the post-war generation of gay men and women, who adopted it as a defiant motif of queer liberation.

The pink triangle that sat in the blackness of the ‘Silence=Death’ posters had one significant detail – it was no longer pale and pointing downward. On these posters it was now standing up, hot pink, like a prophetic pyramid pointing in the direction that a community, devastated by AIDS was about the take.

Recently, I spoke with Avram Finkelstein, co-creator of ‘Silence=Death’, enduring propagandist and author of a new book, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through Its Images.

To understand the genesis of a design that influenced an entire movement of AIDS activism, I wanted to understand the personal, social and political context in which it was created. I asked Avram about formation of Silence=Death collective in the mid-’80s.

“We toyed with idea of a poster showing a tattooed body, but soon realised that any representation of skin tone would be inherently exclusionary.

THE SILENCE=DEATH COLLECTIVE

“The Silence=Death collective was a six member conscious-raising affiliation, we came together in 1985 and talked about our lives and sex in the age of AIDS,” Avram explains. “At each meeting the conversation would always steer around to politics. One of our first ideas was a creative response to a New York Times piece written by an arch-conservative, William Buckley calling for the tattooing of people living with HIV.

“We toyed with idea of a poster showing a tattooed body, but soon realised that any representation of skin tone would be inherently exclusionary. We settled on using iconography and over the space of six months, we deliberated over every aspect of the design, from its message, to the colours and typeface. We sent the final poster design to print by end of 1986 and paid for them to be pasted all over the streets of New York.”

ACT UP

How did the ‘Silence=Death’ slogan became forever fused with the branding of AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP)? Avram explains its timeline, from a political poster into a slogan for a emerging movement:

“In March 1987, we went to hear AIDS activist, Larry Kramer deliver a fiery speech at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Centre. At the meeting it was decided to form an AIDS Action Committee (later called ACT UP). One of the ACT UP members asked me to give them some of our Silence=Death posters for one of their actions.

The media immediately picked up on the visual narrative because it spoke their language, and from that moment the slogan became synonymous with ACT UP. Although we made the Silence=Death posters in 1986, it was ACT UP who brought them to life and re-enforced the message in the public consciousness.”

GRAN FURY

The lack of a formal hierarchy within ACT UP, coupled with its large collaborative meetings lent itself to the formation of many smaller affiliation groups. One of these diverse collectives was a small agitprop unit called, Gran Fury. Its members consisted of designers and artists who produced various public campaigns about the AIDS crisis, using t-shirts, posters, stickers, billboards and video work to pierced social issues and subverted the lexicon of mainstream media. Avram explains how Gran Fury came about:

“In July 1987, the curator of the New Museum in New York, wanted someone from the Silence=Death collective to create an installation in the windows of the museum. I organised on the floor of an ACT UP open committee to create that show. Gran Fury’s dynamic was very different from the insular structure of the Silence=Death collective, because it had the full power of ACT UP’s weight and visibility behind it.

“At that time there was no information about AIDS and there was a lot of fear; people literally thought you could get AIDS from a mosquito bite. It’s important to note that it was the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle in America and there was a lot of airtime that needed to be filled, so getting coverage about the AIDS crisis was easier.”

Into the early ’90s, Gran Fury muscled in on public spaces and advertising billboards to agitate, as well as to inform the public on the importance of safer sex. One of their posters featured a picture of a large erect penis with the text: “Sexism rears its unprotected ugly head”. Another poster showing three couples of varying races and genders, kissing had the tagline: “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do”.

AFTER SILENCE

In the 30 years since the creation of Silence=Death and the formation of ACT UP there seems to be a renewed appetite for propagandist creativity, especially with the rise of Trump. Avram shares his perspective on creative responses in an age of resistance and post-truth:

“ The media immediately picked up on the visual narrative because it spoke their language, and from that moment the slogan became synonymous with ACT UP.

“We’re trained to think that one million people on the streets protesting has meaning, and it does. However, imagine if those one million people were spilt up into small five person affiliation groups with each group working independently on their actions; that would have far more power. Even if you’ve never heard or read about it, every single articulation of political engagement has meaning.”

‘After Silence: A History of AIDS Through Its Images’ by Avram Finkelstein is published by University of California Press